PHILIPPE JACQUES DE LOUTHERBOURG, R.A. | LANDSCAPE WITH A HERD OF CATTLE, A CASTLE ON A HILL BEYOND, KNOWN AS "MORNING AFTER THE RAIN"

Prince Wenzel Anton von Kaunitz;

His sale, Paris, 13 March 1820, lot 91;

Anonymous sale, London, Sotheby's, 2 July 1986, lot 135, where unsold;

Acquired by present collector in 1986.

D. Diderot, Salon de 1765, pp. 217-8;

Critiques de Peintures et sculptures de Messieurs de l'Académie Royale l'An 1765, Paris 1765, p. 28;

Mercure de France, November 1765, p. 157;

M. C. Blanc, "Jacques-Philippe Loutherbourg," in Histoire des peintres de toutes les Ecoles, école Française, vol. II, Paris 1862, p. 2;

E-M. Bukdahl, Diderot critique de'art. I. Théorie et practique dans les Salons de Diderot, Copenhagen 1980, p. 343;

O. Lefeuvre, Philippe-Jacques de Loutherbourg, Paris 2012, pp. 140, 197, cat. no. 35, reproduced pp. 140 and 197. 

Paris, Salon of 1765, no. 135. 

This beautifully preserved landscape, completed when Loutherbourg was just 25 years old, was exhibited at the Paris Salon under the title "Morning after the rain" in 1765, the year it was painted. At that time and until at least 1820, the painting had a pendant landscape known as "Beginning of a storm at sunset," now lost. The bright blues and greens of the present composition likely complemented the warmer colors of the pendant, and evoke a crisp atmosphere. Loutherbourg probably painted this work while in the studio of Francesco Casanova, his teacher in Paris after an initial training period with Carle van Loo.